Historical salvage

Ghost stories

A trawl through an historic underbelly

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe. By Norman Davies. Allen Lane; 830 pages; £30. To be published in America in January as “Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations” by Viking; $40. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

HISTORY, most people reckon, is what you can remember about the past. But the forgotten bits can be the most interesting ones. Norman Davies terms his new book, “Vanished Kingdoms”, a work of “historical salvage” in which he brings to the surface long-sunken wrecks of European history.

The variety is striking: the Byzantine empire lasted more than 1,000 years; the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine barely 24 hours. Some, like Aragon or the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, grew into empires. Others (Eire and Estonia) started life by breaking away from someone else's empire. The timeline ranges from the fall of Rome to the present. Mr Davies is not the sort of historian who sticks to books. His magpie's eye for detail includes not just quirks of the past but first-hand reportage worthy of a fine travel writer.

Some wrecks have sunk deeper than others. Most readers will have a vague idea about Prussia (or Borussia as he calls it). Few will know of the Visigoths' kingdom of Tolosa, centred approximately on modern Toulouse, or an ancient British domain in what is now modern Scotland, so completely forgotten that even locals have never heard of it.

Mr Davies is well known as an iconoclast who punctures the comforting myths of countries (like England or Russia) that history has blessed with conquest, expansion and linguistic dominance. He enjoys highlighting the stories of the underdogs—be they the Welsh or the Estonians. All empires fall and all states eventually fail; the end of the United Kingdom “is a foregone conclusion”. That is a provocative point, but predictions without dates are easy. All trees fall; it is spotting the diseased ones that is tricky.

Even his fans would not say that Mr Davies's forte is details; some niggling errors deserve speedy correction. His pen sometimes runs away with him: it is silly to call a language “gobbledygook” (as he terms Estonian) just because you don't understand it. But like Mr Davies's other works, “Vanished Kingdoms” gives full rein to his historical imagination and enthusiasms, imparting a powerful sense of places lost in time. All across Europe ghosts will bless him for telling their long-forgotten stories.